I remember my first IIS server deployment. Back in those days it was a lot more difficult than it is now. Walking miles to the data center from my desk, in the snow, uphill both ways. Those were the days. You younger administrators have it easy.
Well, in fact, you don’t. Sure, the initial default installation of IIS is simple, and you may have already done that, but you probably didn’t get all the software components and configuration you needed. In fact for many years most administrators would click a button to install IIS and walk away, leaving the rest of the installation and configuration for an imaginary “someone else.” This method doesn’t result in a successful web server. In this chapter I help you get your install right. As an added bonus I also show you a few tricks I doubt you’ve heard of that can turn a deployment into an enjoyable task.
I also explore the placement of the web server in your infrastructure in this chapter and in the rest of the book. The physical location can affect website configuration, access to back-end applications such as databases, and firewall settings that in turn affect your security. Your infrastructure will play a large role in the success of your production web environment, so you need to think about where to locate the web server and how it will be protected. In this book’s labs you’ll install and begin to manage the WebBikez web server in Smalltown, U.S.A.